Unsurprisingly, Oscar Wilde was a great letter writer, and this selection from his earliest to his final letters presents an impressive biography of an extraordinary person and a gigantic talent. It is arranged to expose the private as well as the famous public Oscar Wilde and develops from his beyond-precocious early ideas and wit through his great fame and celebrity to his chastened, unhappy, but movingly humane final thoughts during and after his brutal imprisonment.
I don't know of anyone who could more exquisitely read Wilde's words and "perform" these letters than Brian Bedford, one of the great masters of the spoken word. He does not impersonate Wilde, except suggestively as he reads the letters but Bedford also offers Peter Wylde's explanatory remarks. Still, inevitably, Bedford seems to become Oscar Wilde as he reads Wilde's memorable personal comments.
I suspect that the Oscar Wilde who was an international celebrity speaking spontaneously and reading from his works, especially in the United States, would have arranged these readings more as a performance with an emphasis to entertain. Some may be disappointed that Ever Yours, Oscar is not in that way more like Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight. But Peter Wylde -- a distinguished actor, director, translator, and most notably teacher of theater art and works has selected and arranged these letters to let us appreciate their author while informing us more intimately about him. The result is charming, witty, brilliant, imposing, and painful, but never manipulative or maudlin. When Wilde writes in almost his last letter that he cannot even afford to die, the accumulated hurt and injustice in that utterance reaches way beyond pathos into tragedy.
Oscar Wilde's later days remain painful to hear about: the irony of his unquenchably great literary and dramatic invention and achievement continuing to rise as his personal circumstances plummet into what may be unexaggeratedly described as horror is difficult to understand. The large soul that is expressed in his resulting acute pain but never self-pity is very moving. And his ultimately free spirit is worth cherishing.
A valuable companion piece to Bedford's classic revival of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest at Stratford this season, Ever Yours, Oscar is not the same sort of thrilling evening in the theater, but it is a fine piece of work to appreciate.
